Chapter 6: The Domain of the Queen of Water

The third portal was reportedly located near the north coast of Taisia, atop the Ashe River Plateau, just outside Veninmark, the city in the shadow of Taisia's largest volcano. As they flew closer to the volcano the portal could be seen shining like a blue sun in the distance.

Ingrid had never seen the plateau before, though she had heard about the famous natural beauty of the place. The flat, table-like highland region was lined with deep river canyons and a handful of alpine lakes. Vaska insisted that it was much more impressive from the ground and Ingrid estimated she was right.

There was an airship outside the city and they landed to rest. The ship's captain informed them that Ayaru's main force had attacked New Heyl in the floodplains beyond the plateau, and the region was too dangerous for a mission to close the portal. His squadrons of fighter jets had already mostly cleared the enemy forces out of the Domain of Water so it was likely safe for Ingrid to enter. They flew on, out over the plateau and through the glistening blue ring into the Domain of the Queen of Water.

The sky was a lovely shade of blue with a hint of purple. Far above, deep out in the space beyond the high clouds, there were several transparent blobs of water, each perhaps the size of a planet. They refracted in violent caustics the dark blue light of the single giant moon on the horizon.

The waves were massive, rolling things, like shifting hills as tall as buildings. The water was nearly transparent, like the pure waters in the pool at a fancy seaside resort. The seafloor was laced with a too-perfect pattern of light and dark, deep ocean juxtaposed against the sand just a short distance under the surface. Where the sand ended there was a perfectly vertical drop down into the depths. This pattern of light and dark, water and sand, stretched out to the horizon in all directions in a dizzying and impossible maze.

As they went deeper into the Domain of Water they flew over a large island. There was a tall wooden tower at the highest point with a massive red pennant fluttering at the apex. There were dwellings on the island, a city even. Tiny dots walked through the streets.

"It reminds me of those floating islands I saw in the Domain of Wind," Vaska said.

"Let's fly down to get a better look," Ingrid said.

"No!" Titania said. "Stay focused. Get the contract crystals and leave this place quickly."

They found the jet with the contract crystals quickly and they just as quickly shot it down. It was defending when the missile blew both wings off and the conical tube of the fuselage followed a perfect parabolic path down toward the water. Ingrid chased the thing as it fell but by the time she reached the crests of the huge waves that aluminum spike had penetrated the surface with such perfect preservation of momentum that it carried the contract crystals to a depth where Titania could not claim them.

"What do we do now?" Ingrid asked.

"You mortals can swim, right?" Titania asked. "Go swim down there and get the contracts."

"Don't be ridiculous. Humans can't swim down that far."

"Do something! Do anything you need to do to get those crystals. I command it."

"Daughter of the Queen of Water!" Vaska said. "This ocean below us, how deep is it?"

"Not very deep," the water elemental in the hydraulics replied.

"Let me ask this another way. What is the maximum pressure at the bottom of this ocean?"

"The pressure is constant everywhere."

"Really? Fascinating! Ingrid, I think I have an idea."

"What is it?" Ingrid asked.

"I need to go back to the airship. The one near Taisia City. The one with my library."

"We absolutely do not have time for that," Titania said.

"This is the Domain of the Queen of Water," Vaska calmly explained. "As soon as those crystals sank beneath the water they became subject to the laws of the Elemental Queen. We must contend with those laws directly or we will never get the crystals. And for that I need my library."

"Then we should close the other portal."

"That would be inefficient. We know the main force is attacking New Heyl and the fighting is very intense. Which means we are forced to wait until the airships from other regions in Taisia have arrived before it's safe to go through that portal. Also, we are going to have to spend some time working on this problem either way. We might as well spend that time now while we wait."

This response seemed to satisfy the elemental.

They went back out toward the portal and as they did Ingrid flew very low over the island with the wooden tower and the huge red pendant. Right over the rooftops of the town there and in the streets the people wore masks and they walked side-by-side with water elementals.

"Why do they have water elementals?" Ingrid asked.

"Maybe we should go down there and ask them," Vaska said.

This suggestion provoked Titania to resume her fuming.

Ingird's original airship had flown north from Taisia city and it had gone about sixty miles north by the time they landed a few hours later. Jack Vail waited for them on the deck and his team immediately began fussing over the fighter jet after Ingrid and Vaska climbed down the ladder.

"Finished already?" he asked.

"No," Ingrid said flatly.

Vaska frantically darted about her room pulling books off her shelf. It was almost dusk so Ingrid took a shower and crawled into bed.

Vaska continued to work on the design through the night and Ingrid slept. By morning the airship had traveled south of Veninmark and the portal to the Domain of Water was visible through the windows of Vaska's room. Vaska was still awake frantically working on the diagrams. She had a half-empty pitcher of cold coffee on her desk.

"I've got it!" she said.

Ingrid groaned. "Yes?"

Vaska gave her a book open to an engineering diagram, all annotated with arcane terms and symbols. The primary design looked something like a mid-wing airplane with oversized wings, but it also featured a funny pair of long boat-like structures underneath instead of landing gear. There was also a propeller facing backwards in a gap where the horizontal and vertical stabilizers crossed.

"What is it?"

"It's a flying submarine!"

"What's a submarine?"

"It's a type of ship designed to sink."

"That doesn't sound very useful."

"It can come back up after it sinks."

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"How?"

"There are these chambers called ballast tanks and they can fill with water, which then gives the whole ship negative buoyancy. That causes the ship to sink. Then later you summon a wind elemental in the ballast tanks and they pump air into the tanks which pushes the water out. This creates positive buoyancy and the ship floats back to the surface."

"And this airplane can do that?"

"Yes. Submarines have been written about extensively but they have very little practical military use, at least right now. They are very hard to navigate using current technology. Submarine captains rely on extensive sea charts which is why they are mostly used defensively.

"Submarines are also vulnerable to underwater mines. A few years ago the Imperial Navy came to the Heylin Society of Aeronautical Engineers asking for a flying submarine. They argued that such a craft would be able to fly over areas that are known to have underwater mines, land on the water, and sink so that they can wait in ambush."

"And this is the design?"

"Yes. This was the design that the society proposed. The navy never built any but the design went through multiple reviews in the highest levels of the society and it was a good starting point. However I found flaws with the design but I believe I've fixed them."

"How does it work?"

"The pontoons can be used both to float and to sink. A wind elemental prevents water from filling the cabin where the pilots sit. While the aircraft is underwater it uses a lightning elemental to power the propeller in the rear."

They went up on deck and pulled an HY-4 Spearhead fighter jet into an empty parking spot. Vaska plucked three silver crystals and three light yellow crystals off her ornate golden collar. With this she summoned three metal elementals, female forms made of mercurial silver, and three lightning elementals, which appeared to have bodies made entirely out of stormclouds. Right there on the deck, in front of dozens of airmen and officers, she stretched her arms out like a prophet and the elementals went to work.

First the fighter jet melted into its constituent metals, all liquid and flowing. Then the lightning elementals began to assault the liquified metal with spears of electric yellow, crackling and sparking. Right before Ingrid's eyes the blobs of metal began to reshape themselves, slowly evolving by degrees to resemble the design of the flying submarine. When it was finally done the excess metal pooled and then solidified into raw ingots and the fighter jet's three tires plopped out onto the deck and wobbled each like a coin and then stopped.

Jack Vail and the rest of Ingrid's maintenance crew fussed over the craft for another hour, installing gauges and leather seat cushions and other non-metal components. They worked with a practiced quickness. Once Vaska's seat was installed she sat down and fell asleep and she remained asleep until Ingrid flew the thing, with an escort of six fighter jets, back through the portal to the spot where the contract crystals had been lost.

Ingrid flew very slow with full flaps over the mountainous waves. She dipped the nose down toward the crest of an incoming wave and at the last second she pulled up sharply and the wave came up and hit the pontoons. The airplane went forward a little ways but even as the wave dropped away it did not produce enough lift to leave the water. Soon the friction of the water brought the airplane to a halt and then it just sat there in the same spot, going up and down as the waves rolled by.

Ingrid was about to jostle Vaska awake but she was already awake.

"We need to go under," Ingrid said.

"Right."

Vaska pulled a lever and there was a hissing sound. Slowly the craft began to sink below the waves. Vaska gave some commands to the wind elemental and then they waited. Soon the water washed over the windshield, but even after that it was a very long time before they were completely underwater. Vaska summoned a lightning elemental and Ingrid pushed on the stick and they went down toward the maze-like pattern of sand and deep ocean.

It was a bit like flying very slowly. It was very quiet down under the ocean and even the propeller on the back didn't make much noise. The three axis control worked mostly the same and it didn't take Ingrid long to adapt to the difference. They went down between two maze-ridges of sand and into the dark depths beyond. After a long time it started to get hard to see.

"Titania," Vaska said.

"Yes?"

"Can you go outside and create light for us?"

The light elemental appeared outside the airplane and this illuminated the sheer vertical walls on either side. They kept going down and as they went it got so dark outside that the only light was the oily mother-of-pearl light which Titania created. Ingrid tried to keep the nose between the two vertical walls and this wasn't too hard, but eventually a cerulean line appeared in the depths. It grew and it grew lighter as they approached it. Vaska asked the water elemental about the light but she seemed confused.

"What is causing that light?"

"Mother."

"What is there?"

"What is where?"

"Beyond the light."

"There is air beyond the light."

"Air underwater?"

"Yes."

"Ingrid, maybe you should point the nose down," Vaska said.

But Ingrid already knew this. As they passed through the light Ingrid pushed down hard on the stick and they fell down out of the water vertically into the foggy emptiness. Above them the maze-like pattern repeated itself inverted and it replaced the sky. Far below them there was another ocean, identical in color to the sky beyond the upper ocean, blue with a hint of purple, extending off in every direction unbroken and eerie and perfect. Directly below them there was an island.

Ingrid held the stick pushed forward which caused the nose of the flying submarine to drop down with gravity. The airframe shuddered with a sound like metallic hail and the wings rocked. Meanwhile Vaska summoned fire elementals in the engines and they slowly spooled up as they fell. The engines reached normal power far after the airspeed was in the green arc but they were still far above that lower sea and Ingrid did not level off for a long time. When she finally did she pitched down into a descending helix which lasted until they were almost at the level of that lower ocean.

Full flaps once more Ingrid made a second landing in the water. She used differential thrust from the two engines to negotiate the flat mirror-like surface of the blue-purple water toward the pale sands of the island. She drove the airplane right up onto the shore where it jolted upon impact with the sand.

Ingrid and Vaska left the airplane on the beach and they walked inland toward the dominant structure on the island. It appeared to be some type of resort.

There were scantily-clad people of both sexes engaged in various sports on the beach. In the center of that semi-erotic jubilee by the sea, under the shade of two ancient palms, sipping on some cocktail from within a massive sawed-off fruit, there was a buxom woman in a bright red one-piece bathing suit. She had long blue hair but her eyes were the same red-orange color of a fire elemental. She stood up and she was well over eight feet tall.

"Hello mortals," the titaness said.

"It's the Elemental Queen!" Vaska said.

"Yes. This is my Domain, mortals. You were very clever to find this resort where my immortal worshipers revel by the sea for all time. You are, without a doubt, searching for these things which fell down into the sands of my resort not long ago."

With a flick of her wrist the three contract crystals appeared, shining like blue stars above the sensuous curves of her fingers.

"Yes," Ingrid said. "We need those crystals to close the portal."

The Queen of Water offered the contract crystals and Ingrid took them.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome, mortal."

"Great Queen of Water," Ingrid said. "We passed an island in your Domain and there were people living on this island with some water elementals."

"Your Daughters," Vaska added helpfully.

"Who are these people?"

"This is a thing that is best articulated by one of your own kind," the Queen of Water replied. "Reese! Come to me. I have need of your wisdom in the ways of mortal creatures touched by the works of Ashe."

A young woman with sandy brown hair and a spicy two-piece bathing suit padded up to them. "What is it?" she asked.

Ingrid repeated the question.

"Those people hold the contracts for your banks," Reese said. "There are civilizations living in the Elemental Domains composed entirely of religious fanatics who believe they will go to paradise after a life of service to the contracts. But they have been deceived. This deception is the work of the Queen of Light."

"The Queen of Light cannot deceive!" Ingrid protested. "Deception is something the Queen of Darkness does."

"The Queen of Darkness has been sealed away. The Queen of Light drinks deeply from the dark half of the divine power and it drives her to madness."

"Nonsense," Titania said. She flashed into existence on the beach beside Ingrid.

"The luck elemental," Reese said. "Interesting. Would you be willing to take me with you when you leave this place? I would like to follow the path of the luck elemental, wherever that leads."

"You want to come with us?" Ingrid asked.

"Yes."

"If Reese wishes to travel with you mortals I will allow it," the Queen of Water said. "She will be able to answer any questions you might have about the difficulties which plague the Queen of Light."

"She should go with us," Vaska said.

"Yes," Ingrid said.

"But how are we going to get back up to the surface? Our airplane was designed to land on the water, not fly up into the water."

"I will use my own High Daughter to open a portal to the physical realm," Reese said.

And Reese did do so. They did not need to use the flying submarine to go underwater again. Once they were outside Ingrid summoned the High Daughter through the contract crystals and they closed the two portals the Ayaruans had created.